Between a Mother and a Daughter

“Mom! Remember when you were playing that person who broke her leg? And we went to your dressing room and ordered Chinese and watched TV? Well, me and Dylan want to do that and bring two friends. Please?”

Christine Ebersole, dressed like the other moms, in a T-shirt, sweat pants and Ugg boots, stood tall as a maypole, looked down at her jumping 9-year-old son, Aron, and his jumping friend, Dylan, and tried not to laugh.

“No, sweetheart, this dressing room is too small,” she said.

“Small places are funner! We could watch ‘WrestleMania!’ ”

“I can’t commit to that,” Ebersole said, starting toward the car, the two boys dogging her, while her 10-year-old daughter, MaeMae, and her friend rolled their eyes and kept their distance. “It’s too many people; they don’t allow it.”

This time her laugh broke through, as well it might have. Ebersole, who won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for the 2001 revival of “42nd Street”(playing Dorothy Brock, the “person who broke her leg”), is the celebrated star this season of the Broadway musical “Grey Gardens.”The show is based on the 1975 Maysles brothers’ documentary of the same name about Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Edith, known as Little Edie, the aunt and first cousin, respectively, of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. They ran through their fortune and ended up living in squalor in their raccoon-infested East Hampton home, with 52 cats for company. In the first act, Ebersole plays the middle-aged mother who seemingly sabotages her daughter’s romances to ensure her lifelong companionship, and in the second act she plays the middle-aged daughter whose battle between ambivalence and devotion to her elderly mother keeps her locked in an eternal childhood. It is an emotionally layered tour de force that has earned her a Tony nomination (the show received 10) and sent critics into paroxysms of ecstasy.

It is also a performance so demanding — of the show’s 23 numbers, Ebersole sings in 18 of them — that she has called the dual-role assignment “my Lear.” The idea of four 9-year-old boys watching “WrestleMania” in her dressing room as she does it is laughable, indeed.

But Ebersole wears her acclaim lightly. She doesn’t act like a Broadway star, though she certainly looks like one. At 5-foot-9, she commands the stage, and her blue-eyed kewpie-doll face plays pretty and big, every nuance hitting the back of the balcony, right on target.

Offstage, it’s as if someone removed her battery pack. She has a comfortable Midwestern charm and a ready laugh, often aimed at herself. Walking through her town of Maplewood, N.J., before picking up the kids from school, she called everyone by name and hugged the guys behind the counter at the Bagel Chateau. Ebersole was raised in Winnetka, Ill., the swanky Chicago suburb, the youngest of four children whose father was the president of a steel company in Milwaukee. Although she was popular in school, she says she and her family were ideologically out of sync with the town’s upper-crust exclusivity; her parents belonged not to the local country club but to the A.C.L.U. Surrounded by Republicans, the Ebersoles remained liberal Democrats who idolized the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and opposed the Vietnam War. She felt the difference keenly enough that in the cabaret act she sometimes performs, she still says, “Winnetka is an Indian word for affluent gentile.’ ”

The family’s religion, Unitarian, was also considered offbeat, she recalls. Ebersole grew up to honor the sanctity of all religions and still does. The old guard is represented in her dressing room, packed with Buddhas, prayer candles and crucifixes, with a mezuzah at its entrance; while the New Age dapples her conversation with elaborate descriptions of her psychic dreams and frequent admonitions that “every adverse situation is an opportunity for spiritual growth.” When she found a scarf lying on the street during a “Grey Gardens” workshop at Playwrights Horizons Off Broadway, she was convinced it was left there for her by Big and Little Edie (who died in 1977 and 2002, respectively). But if her good-natured chatter can sometimes seem stagy and self-indulgent, you need only look at the woman’s work ethic to refresh your focus.

Even in the theater, where youth is less an obsession than it is in Hollywood, starring roles for middle-aged women — especially of the depth and range of the Beales — are exceedingly rare. Ebersole was so intent on moving “Grey Gardens” to Broadway that she became one of its producers, spearheading the drive to raise funds. After “42nd Street,” she spent three years working mostly Off Broadway and in cabaret, though she was nominated for a Tony Award for a supporting role in the revival of “Dinner at Eight”at Lincoln Center. “Grey Gardens” was clearly her shot at the big time, and she has risen to the occasion and then some. In the last year, she has made more than 100 appearances, including interviews, to promote the show, regularly sacrificing her weekly day off. She performed at benefits; turned up in the shoe department at Bloomingdale’s for a charity tie-in; rode in costume on a “Grey Gardens” float as part of the Gay Pride Parade; and sang at the 85th birthday party of Ben Bradlee, the former executive editor of The Washington Post, who with his wife, the writer Sally Quinn, bought the Grey Gardens house in East Hampton from Little Edie in 1979.

Since the musical began playing at the Walter Kerr Theater last October, Ebersole has missed only seven performances — six for illness, one to sing at the nationally televised Kennedy Center Honors. When she took a vacation the week before Easter, the show’s gross receipts dipped by almost a third. For better or worse, she is the show.

That makes it especially hard to be the mother of three children (Elijah, the eldest, is 13), though Ebersole is grateful for the work. After beginning her career in the theater — she played Guenevere to Richard Burton’s King Arthur in “Camelot”on Broadway in 1980 — Ebersole went to Hollywood, where she worked constantly, either in small parts in movies, guest roles in TV hits or large parts in television series that never quite made it. When she turned 45, the work dried up; her agent told her she was too old. After playing Tom Selleck’s older sister (Selleck is 8 years Ebersole’s senior) and Jeanne Tripplehorn’s mother (Ebersole is 10 years her senior), she had figured that out for herself.

But Ebersole, now 54, has never been much for self-pity. After years of trying to become pregnant, she made peace with her infertility and, shunning the punishing regimen of drugs her doctor recommended, adopted her children instead. “I finally understood that motherhood is not defined by DNA,” she said. “It’s defined by spirit, really. That’s how family is created.” Elijah is half black, half white; MaeMae is Chinese; and Aron, Ebersole says, is “everything,” including Native American.

As for her career, being a star was not her goal. Working was. Fortunately, no one in New York realized her career was over; she and her husband, Bill Moloney, moved their family East. Ebersole met Moloney, a former drummer, when she worked on the television series “The Cavanaughs,” for which he was the musical director. They married in 1988. Three years later, doctors diagnosed an acoustic neuroma, a tumor of his inner ear. The ensuing surgery left him deaf in his left ear, the left side of his face and body partly paralyzed. His career in music was over.

These days Moloney, 57, a kindhearted man who adores his wife (“We’re still on the honeymoon,” he told me), is recovered enough to work as a real estate agent and stay-at-home parent for the five nights and three matinees each week that Ebersole is onstage. Ebersole’s mother, Marian, 89, was widowed in 1998 and for the past three years has lived with the family. Though she suffers from memory loss, the kids love her. She has the only TV in the house.

That makes Ebersole the main breadwinner for six people, three dogs, four cats and a guinea pig. During the run of “Grey Gardens” at Playwrights Horizons, her salary was $575 per week. The salary on Broadway is much improved, though like many families with three children, this one is still in debt.

“I’ve always made money,” Ebersole said gamely earlier in the day, over an untouched tuna melt at the Bagel Chateau. “Not to live in a mansion or have 40 cars, but I’ve always had enough. And I love the theater. In Hollywood, the most famous people do their close-ups first, then it’s 4 a.m. and you’re doing your big scene with the dolly grip. In the theater, you’re a piece of the pie. You might be a big piece, but if the guy’s not there to pull the curtain, no one will see you. I like that.”

In addition to her already-punishing schedule, Ebersole was determined to finish a CD of a live cabaret performance she did with the pianist and singer Billy Stritch last summer at the Metropolitan Room in New York. The performances were taped at the time, but nothing is “live” anymore — rough edges are routinely smoothed over in a studio. On a Friday afternoon in late March, they had their second four-hour session.

Stritch, who met Ebersole when they were both in “42nd Street,” is better known as the accompanist for Liza Minnelli. He was about to leave with her for a Scandinavian tour that Ebersole had dubbed “Springtime in Helsinki,” and the pace he and Ebersole kept during the recording was admirable.

“Christine is not a diva,” Stritch told me later. “She is so well balanced, it’s kind of unusual. When we’re working together, there’s never any drama or neediness. And the voice is a glorious sound. I don’t think she’s had a whole lot of training. It’s a God-given talent — flowing, crystal clear and unique. When I hear her, she doesn’t remind me of anybody else.”

In the studio, Ebersole revealed a completely different aspect than she had with her children. Her manner was still easygoing, but her focus on the work was laser-sharp, and she was merciless on herself about the slightest error. She started with the haunting Irving Berlin ballad “What’ll I Do?” After one take, she held up two fingers. “Two mess-ups,” she announced, coming from the studio into the control room. She listened to the playback and made notes on Post-its. “That’s where I have to take a breath,” she muttered to herself. “O.K., here we go.”

Back in the studio, she put her face right up against the big black circle of the microphone. Stritch played a long, lush introduction to orient her. It didn’t quite work. “How does it start?” she asked distractedly, and he sang it for her. She zoomed in on it, and the second time was magical — melancholy and affecting. She crossed her arms tightly in front of her, as if she were curled up on a couch, obsessed with feelings that ran around her head so hard they somehow came out sung, clarion and unadorned, practically in spite of herself. You absolutely could not figure out how she did it. The take was perfect.

“Can I just hear that?” she asked, re-entering the studio. “I want to see where I messed up. I broke the line the wrong way.” As it played, she hunched over the board, then lifted her head. “I think that’s it,” she said, surprised. “All the things I thought were wrong turned out to be O.K.”

She went on to sing one song after another — “Beyond the Blue Horizon,”“Lullaby of Broadway” — nailing each one.

“Scary,” murmured the producer.

Four hours later they had finished. Tony Tedesco, the drummer, shook his head. “Other people take three days just to set up the bass,” he said. “She did it all in two days.”

There was no time to celebrate; she was late for a costume fitting at the theater. Back in her dressing room, she opened a gift box holding a chocolate cat that her dresser, Jill Frese, had given her. She sniffed. She didn’t have the heart to eat it, not that she’s much for eating. When she finally had that tuna melt, for dinner, in the car on the way to the theater at 5:00, it was the first food she ate that day. She also doesn’t sleep. Menopause, she says.

It seems incredible that she can perform this show without sleeping, but the intricate work she did early on, shaping the characters of both mother and daughter, formed a crucial foundation. Unlike most other Broadway musicals, “Grey Gardens” was developed at the Sundance Institute with Ebersole and her co-star, Mary Louise Wilson (who plays Edith Beale as an old woman), in attendance, along with the director, Michael Greif; the composer, Scott Frankel; the lyricist, Michael Korie; and the librettist, Doug Wright.

“From the beginning,” Greif told me, “it was clear that Christine had incredible insights and instincts about both of these women. At Sundance we had the first act, but for the second act, only a few songs. Scott wrote material for her on the spot. He was inspired by the amazing instrument of her voice and her emotional wells, which are profound.”

Ebersole first saw the “Grey Gardens” documentary four years ago when she returned to L.A. to shoot a TV series. “It was a role where I was going to potentially spend the next five years in a bathrobe flipping pancakes,” she said. “I made a Faustian bargain for the promise of riches, since I had been working Off Broadway. But the pilot was never finished, God and his mercy. And they had to pay me for six episodes.”

While she was there, she stayed with a friend who recommended she watch “Grey Gardens.” “I started and never stopped,” she said. “It would be the last thing I watched in the night and the first thing I watched in the day. One of the things so fascinating about it is, How can this happen to aristocracy? It’s a powerful illusion that wealth can buy you everything, including safety from living with 52 cats and many cat-food cans.”

After Sundance, the work continued at Playwrights Horizons, where Ebersole dug even deeper into the story of the patrician Catholic family circa 1941 — particularly Big Edie’s relationship with her husband and father — who each scorned her aspirations to be a singer, along with Little Edie’s dream of being a dancer. “Part of my continual fascination is with Little Edie’s free spirit and nonconformity,‘” Ebersole said. “She and her mother were never allowed to express themselves as artists, so in an odd way they found freedom of expression in this crazy, messed-up house where they weren’t restricted by anyone or anything. In the first act of the musical, before the divorce when they’re still rich, they really are in a prison. In the second act, they find freedom in the rubble.”

While the bohemian individualism of both Big and Little Edie was hailed by fans of the film, its cinéma vérité style never quite connected the emotional dots of the women’s interdependence the way the show does. Since the musical moved to Broadway, it has found an avid audience of middle-aged women caring for sick and aging mothers, who are grappling with the shifting boundaries of their own relationships. Toward the end of the play, when Little Edie tries to leave — and can’t — the sobs in the theater can be audible.

“Edie’s regret is the road not taken, but she’s also anchored in the truth of her relationship to her mother,” Ebersole said. “Loyalty, responsibility, love and devotion.”

Photo

Credit
Joan Marcus/Associated Press (top); Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Did she draw on her relationship with her own mother?

“It’s hard to say,” she mused, reclining on the leopard-covered daybed tiered with throw pillows. “My mother wasn’t controlling at all. She was a stabilizing force who grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania. Now it’s the big circle game. Taking care of her is a great blessing for me. I’ll tuck her into bed, kiss her on the cheek, wipe up the mess on her blouse from whatever she spilled. I’m returning to her what she gave to me, and I have no ambivalence about it at all. Edie was so devoted to her mother and loved her so much too. But she never became an adult. Both my parents encouraged my independence, they nurtured that.”

What Ebersole may be drawing on most to portray the complexity of Little Edie’s adoration for her mother is her own adoration of her father, an engineer by trade, who yearned to perform himself and never could. “My father started out as a riveter, but he had the soul of an artist,” she said. “He worshiped Shakespeare and had aspirations to be an actor. He claimed that from the first day he laid eyes on me, I was going to be this great dramatic actress.”

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After New Trier Township High School, Ebersole briefly attended MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill., before graduating from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York in 1975. One of her first jobs was as an understudy in the Broadway musical “On the Twentieth Century.” When she learned one morning that she would go on that night, her father flew in to see her.

“He was my greatest supporter,” Ebersole said, clutching a stuffed cat sent by a fan. “I remember being in seventh grade with my homeroom teacher, who was a very sadistic kind of guy. And I was the class clown. I wasn’t a good student, and I remember cracking jokes and talking out of turn with my friends. He took out my report card and said, ‘You think this is funny?’ He read it to the whole class. I was so mortified.

“I went home and told my father, who went nuts and called the teacher. I was in the next room, and the door was closed, but I listened to his voice: ‘Who do you think you are talking to my daughter that way?’ It meant so much to me, that I had some kind of protection against the big, bad world.”

She offers much of the same to her own children. None of them have seen “Grey Gardens,” none of them want to and she’s O.K. with that. “It’s a way for them to control something that’s not in their control,” she said candidly. “The family suffers because I don’t see them and they don’t see me.”

She tries to carve out extra time, making sleepover dates with the two younger children on Friday nights, when she often stays at a hotel in the city before the strenuous double bill on Saturday. “But for Elijah,” she said, “a 13-year-old who is branching out and becoming a man, it’s a whole different set of things.”

When she’s absent, Ebersole worries about the children’s bedtimes, which can stretch to 10 p.m. or later. “I really believe they don’t sleep because of my job,” she said. “They’re on my clock. Bill always waits up for me. He’s the Rock of Gibraltar.” He certainly sounds like it. Following his neuroma and paralysis, he went into “a crushing depression,” Ebersole said. “It was an unbearable loss, of his identity and his livelihood. When the children came they gave him a new purpose, a point of focus. It was the end of one road but the beginning of something new. At least that’s the way we’ve come to understand it.”

Ebersole’s workweek ends after the Sunday matinee, around 5:30 p.m., and she goes straight home so the family can have dinner together. “Last Sunday, we put on our pajamas,” she recalled, “and we were watching something on the computer. Aron put his head on my shoulder and boom, he was asleep at 8:15.”

She sighed. “It causes tremendous guilt. At the same time I don’t want to give them the impression that I’m going to jail when I go to work, because I love what I do.”

She waved her hand. “These are high-class problems, for God’s sake,” she said briskly, “and I’m always reminding myself of that. The mantra, when my brain is so crowded, is ‘Be here now.’ There’s a Zen to acting, by being in the moment. That’s where the power is. But a lot of times the ego will say: ‘Look at me! I want to be first!’ Sometimes getting that to be quiet is a struggle.” She laughed. “You have to just say, ‘O.K., go sit down because right now, I got a big number to do.’ ”

That spirit has served her well offstage too. After being present at Elijah’s birth in 1993, she and Moloney spent two years negotiating the bureaucracy in China to adopt a girl, only to be denied. They went back to the lawyer who facilitated Elijah’s adoption, and he found a couple in Minnesota who were having a boy but had not committed to giving him up.

The day before Ebersole met the birth mother in Los Angeles, she had one of her psychic dreams: she was on her grandmother’s farm, where she kept a herd of oxen. “My grandmother had just died, and the oxen were so bereft,” she recalled, “that they lay down in the fields and wouldn’t get up. When I woke up, I was in these racking sobs. I think I was feeling the birth mother relinquishing her child, the suffering of that. We went to the lawyer’s office, then down to Venice Beach with the birth parents, where there was this Asian man selling these artifacts. And there was an ox that was lying down. I picked it up, and the birth mother says: ‘Oh, that’s me. I was born in the year of the ox and so will this child be.’ ”

The baby wasn’t due for a few months, and the couple, still undecided, left town to await his birth. “I was doing a TV show at the time called ‘Ink’ with Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen,” Ebersole recalled, “and just when I was saying, ‘God, please don’t put one more thing on my plate,’ that’s when the big pile of mashed potatoes came smack dab in the middle. Because I came home one day and got a message saying, ‘We have your baby girl in China.’ For some reason, they had changed their minds. I started laughing my head off. Just when you’re trying to control everything, here comes the baby girl from China!”

Moloney got on a plane and met MaeMae, who was then 10 months old, on April 29, 1997. Aron was born on May 3, and his birth parents decided to give him up. Moloney flew back to Los Angeles with MaeMae on May 7. A few hours later, Aron arrived. “In one night,” Ebersole recalled, “we had two more kids.”

The next challenge for combining family with work is for Ebersole to relocate them to London next season, when the show’s producers plan to open “Grey Gardens” in the West End. She’s figuring the best thing would be to home-school them.

“No, not me,” she said, laughing. “That would be assuming I have the capability of being a teacher. In the first grade when they were asking me to help on the homework, I was running from them. The joke in the house is when I don’t know the answer, I say, ‘I skipped school that day.’ So somebody’s always saying, ‘Mom, you skipped a lot of school,’ because I can’t help them on anything.”

She wasn’t quite sure she liked the sound of that. “You know, I experience psychic phenomena so people think I must be crazy,” she said. “But you have to be accessible and intelligent to be a good actor. I might not have gotten the best grades in school, but I have a very high level of emotional intelligence. You have to be open to receive. Because that’s the grace and the burden of the life of an actor. You not only see the suffering, you are the suffering. You become the vehicle with which to convey the humanity. That’s what makes us who we are.”

So when she’s onstage with tears streaming as she sings, never missing a note, what is she thinking, exactly?

She considered. “Sometimes I’m literally thinking nothing,” she said, “just experiencing the emotion. It’s Edie’s journey, trying to get away. That’s my first obligation, to tell her story, though it’s informed by my experience of living.” She thought about it some more, and there was serenity in her face, and joy. “A lot of what happens in art, my art, I can’t articulate and I don’t fully understand,” she said. “I can’t explain it. I just can do it.”

A Monday night in mid-April was an-other “night off” when Ebersole worked. She began at 6 p.m. at a hotel in Times Square, as host for the Touring Broadway Awards, which are essentially Tony Awards for road productions. From there, she was to perform at the annual benefit for Playwrights Horizons along with Billy Stritch.

Ebersole was in full makeup, a rare occurrence offstage, and she looked striking in black evening pants and an ivory jacket. She went onstage to a huge ovation. A large part of the audience were road presenters, and not incidentally, Tony voters. It was time to be charming. “I toured several shows in my younger years,” she said. “ ‘Camelot’ with Richard Burton.” They oohed audibly. “You learn a lot of life lessons on the road,” she went on. “Let’s see, what are some of them? If you’re drunk and on the road, it doesn’t count.” Big applause. The crowd was hers.

After the presentation, Ebersole was swamped.

“Christine, you don’t remember me,” an older gentleman said. She looked at his face. “I sure do remember you. From Oklahoma, right?” He practically died and went to heaven.

Two men from Chicago approached. “We’re talking to your agent about coming to do our gala,” they said.

“Fantastic! I love Chicago.” Ebersole carried herself with the aplomb of a political wife, though happily, she did not engage in any political discussions. Her politics hew to the Rosie O’Donnell school of 9/11 conspiracy theories; perhaps they channel those out-of-sync feelings she experienced in Winnetka. But when the subject arises, it’s the only time she seems to lose the ease and good humor that define her.

At Guastavino’s, a barn of a banquet hall in Midtown, the Playwrights staff members had arranged for Ebersole and Stritch to use the manager’s office to relax in before they performed. Ebersole carried her next outfit with her in a white plastic bag, and Jill Frese, her dresser, headed into the inner office. A few minutes later, the outer door opened and the manager, a young man with dark hair, started yelling.

“That is my office and I need respite! I agreed to two people, not this,” he said, gesturing at Frese and me. The collective silence that greeted him was stunned.

It took about 10 seconds for Ebersole to burst out laughing. But she never did go back into the office. She stayed in the outer room juggling the hand mirror and her lip pencil.

Meanwhile, dinner was behind schedule. Ebersole and Stritch were to perform at 9; at 8:40 the entrees were still on the tables. At 8:50 someone finally remembered to feed them too.

9:10. A staff member from Playwrights Horizons came inside. “They’re going to serve dessert before you go on, then clear the plates, so there won’t be any noise while you’re singing,” she said.

9:20. Ebersole was called onstage to loud applause. The spotlight found her, and she turned toward the audience. Just at that moment, the kitchen doors opened and a line of waiters headed out. Dessert had not been served after all. The hall filled with the thudding sounds of plates hitting tables.

Ebersole hovered in the light and listened, her smile luminous. Then she opened her mouth and began to sing.

COSTUME DRAMA: Video of Christine Ebersole, who talks about the wild and inventive style of Edie Beale and the costumes in “Grey Gardens.” nytimes.com/magazine

Correction: June 17, 2007

An article on June 3 about Christine Ebersole misstated the location of the high school she attended. New Trier Township High School was and is in Winnetka, Ill., but she attended classes at a different campus in Northfield.